Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt

Journal of Third World Studies, Spring 2003 by Murdoch, Norman H

Ferguson, James. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. 330pp.

James Ferguson investigates the problem of what happens when an economic downturn withdraws the expectation of urban life and all that is entailed in the idea of "modernity" in a developing country such as Zambia was in the 1960s and 1970s? His answer is that there are major social and personal dislocations that occur in a move "back to the land," land to which many of the dislodged copper-belt workers had never really been attached in the first place. Others who had once lived on the land had moved away, both physically and psychologically, from a long since forgotten past. Ferguson is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California. Irvine, and an ethnographer who has made several research trips to Zambia. The Zambia story provides a pattern that is familiar to students of southern Africa, but it is also a painful object lesson of what has occurred recently in Russia, Indonesia, and many Third World countries in Africa, Asia, South America, and even in the Balkan countries of Europe In fact, it reflects conditions that occurred during major depression periods in United States history. Not only is the past a distant mirror of the present, but in this case, the contemporary mirrors the past.

Zambia's copper miners learned lessons of modernity and western civilization that came with urban living, from earning ample financial resources with which they purchased clothes, a car, and the basics of Euro-American life. Mine operators and missionaries heralded this life as "progress". But faced with an economic depression in the 1970s and 1980s that forced them out of work and out of cash, most of the miners were forced to make an awkward retreat to the land where they could live without cash income. But the transition "back to the land" was not, as an African friend of mine put it, "a bed of roses".

What happens when urban, "modernized" workers are forced to revise their life-style expectations based on urban economic and social conditions and fit into a new life of subsistence in an African village with people and traditions that they have not honored for years and may not even remember"? In fact, they have learned to recognize those village habits as uncivilized and even "heathen". As an anthropologist and ethnographer Ferguson followed two tracks to answer that question. First, he went to live in the Bemba mining towns of northern Zambia's copper-belt region where he interviewed those single men and families affected by the depressed economy. Through interviews he developed a number of case studies, including some life profiles of those who stayed in town but, more often, of those who returned to the land. He found that a return to social mores long since abandoned, caused disruptions to marriages, a falling out with family and friends, illness, and other social and physical mishaps that in turn wreaked economic disaster and even starvation. Most of all, a forgetting of the proper deference to tribal persons and village manners and customs, including use of language, made many miners outcasts. Their urbanized thought and behavior caused villagers to see them as haughty and ostentatious in their display of wealth. The villagers showed their disdain for the urban workers by alienating their wives and casting spells, often enforced by poisoning their food to emphasize the power of the witchcraft. Other workers who had maintained deferential contacts through frequent visits to the home village with presents for their family had an easier transition back to the land.

Along with the ethnographic studies, Ferguson lays out the history of anthropological analysis since the 1950s, in terms of how expectations of modernity affected Zambian miners. Anthropologists, he finds, were creatures of the mind-set of the times in which they lived. He makes few efforts to stray from this one national field of study, or single work group. But that in no way will limit those who see parallels of his findings elsewhere in Africa or the Third World. Early studies, which seldom dealt with the possibility that progress toward "civilization" could end in a complete reversal of fortune, provide little guidance to anthropologists looking at trends in the last two decades. Progress, by a 1950s standard, implied a nuclear family, a Christian ethic of marriage fidelity, and belief that a good and prosperous life would continue for future generations. Zambians saw their acceptance of the obvious good as preached by missionaries of "civilization" as the just deserts of those in a developing country who accepted Westernization as the path to inevitable progress. The emotional frustration of those who experienced the shock of reversal produced in them an agonizing sense of betrayal. And when it was western corporations that pulled the plug, and not the fault of the African worker, the bewilderment they felt as, "Africans" put "back in their place" as the "heathen" of the colonial era, was enormous.